🎙️Real Life Update: It’s Messy in the Middle

Hey there, CEOs, Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. And today I am recording in a brand new studio. I'm actually in downtown Richmond at an incredible, community called Common House. Which I'm very excited to have joined starting this summer, and I have a lot to update you about, and that's what today's episode is going to be.
Today is the big personal update, and I'm calling it, it's messy in the middle because about three years ago I had the idea for launching. A podcast series, a private podcast called It's Messy In the Middle, as a private separate project that wasn't necessarily about business. And if you've been following me here on Promote Yourself to CEO, you know that we talk all things business strategy here on Promote Yourself to CEO.
We talk all about CEO mindset. We talk about sustainably scaling your business. We talk about systems, all of those things. But in my work with women entrepreneurs over the last. 17, 18 years, I can definitely tell you that what happens in our personal lives impacts our business and vice versa. So about three years ago, I had the idea to launch a podcast project that was gonna live on rachealcook.com called It's Messy in the Middle, and I wanted to take you behind the scenes into my life a little bit more because I had just been through.
A really intense period of time. So three years ago now it's June, 2025, but three years ago it was June, 2022. And it was just so different then. The pandemic had just kind of started to wrap up and during the pandemic, that was hard for a lot of people. Myself included, and we had three kids at home who at the time were in fourth grade and first grade, and we decided to homeschool all three of our kids up until.
That year, June, 2022 was when the kids basically looked at us and they, at that point the twins were finishing up sixth grade homeschool and Mitchell was finishing up, I think it was fourth grade. And they had done well homeschooling. Thankfully my husband Jameson is a teacher. That's what he did before he quit his job teaching to work with me in the business and be a stay-at-home dad,
two and a half years of homeschooling during the pandemic, they basically said to us, we miss being around other kids. So we were in this transition where our kids weren't gonna go back to school. That was a huge transition out of the pandemic, out of homeschooling three kids for several years. At that point, I had also just opened my office in downtown Richmond.
I found this beautiful location. A lot of you have seen photos of it in downtown Richmond, Virginia, where I leased an office space for three years with the intention of that being the space that would host all of my CEO retreats, and also that I could rent it out to other creatives and other small business owners.
I worked with local. Interior designers to make it just absolutely stunning. And my business was growing really, really quickly, which was very exciting. And at the time it was just a lot of change happening, right? So change in my own immediate family here with my husband and my kids going from homeschooling for the past few years to now we're gonna transition back to.
In person real school. Me having this beautiful office space, my business taking off and growing really quickly. And I also at the time had just gotten through the first year of my dad's recovery this is a big topic that I haven't talked a ton about on here, but the pandemic was really hard on my parents and my dad's alcoholism went from, I hate to say functional alcoholism, but it went from bad to worse to the point where I had to intervene, and so I had an intervention in, I think it was April of 2021.
And he went to rehab for two months, and that was the point where I really had to step in and take over my mom's full-time nursing care up until literally the pandemic. While my mom has been fully disabled since 1987, she had recovered quite a lot. She was walking with a cane. She was even driving for short distances, like she could drive us to school
then the early two thousands came and she had a series of setbacks that took her from being pretty independent, even though she had a traumatic brain injury and a lot of physical disabilities from that. She went from being pretty independent, able to do all of her daily living activities to having a hip replacement that went really, really wrong, and suddenly she was very much limited in her mobility.
Needed a lot more help to. The fall of 2019, she broke her ankle. And if you've ever had an elderly parent or grandparent who's had a major fall and they broke something, you might have seen what has happened to my mother, which is the minute you can no longer. Put any bearing weight on your, on your legs, on your feet, you start to lose mobility very quickly.
She broke her ankle, she had to stay off her feet from that, she went from being able to walk with a walker and still do a good number of her daily living activities to now being fully wheelchair bound and completely unable to walk and.
That happened right before the pandemic. And I remember when the pandemic started happening. My biggest fear was we had some private caregivers coming in who had been at the, rehabilitation hospital where she was after her fall, and we hired them to come in and provide daytime care for her. And at the time, my dad was trying to handle all the nights and weekends himself, and it just was not a good plan.
He basically forgot that he was now in his seventies and he physically could not be the caregiver that he was. When my mom first got hurt, she was 31 and I think dad was about 36, 35, 36, and he's always been that guy, right? He always was her caregiver. Was able to help her when she needed it, and was able to do a lot of things for her.
But there's a massive difference between helping a disabled person when you're in your thirties and forties and now when you're in your seventies. And so it was kind of like the perfect disaster storm of everything happening at the same point. And it was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back was the pandemic for my parents.
So at that point, dad's alcoholism just. Went off the rails to the point where I was getting calls from my mom and she was extremely scared and stressed and worried. So I pulled together an intervention and actually hired an intervention specialist and got my sisters on board, which was kind of a miracle because at the time we were also having a bit of a strange relationship, and it was one of the biggest.
Challenges I've ever been through in my whole life. Because if you've grown up in a family that has a lot of alcoholism, addiction, dysfunction, a lot of people told me they didn't think it would work, that I would get him to rehab. I got a lot of very sarcastic. Well, good luck with that. But it did work and he did agree to go to rehab and I was so grateful because I thought I was gonna lose my dad I thought.
He was going to die because of how bad his alcoholism had gotten and just the state he was in at that point. And I knew that in order to get him into rehab, I was gonna have to move fast in order to make sure mom was taken care of. So I had this little window that. Showed up for me right before I hired the interventionist and moved forward with the intervention and getting dad into rehab, and that was dad.
And I were having a conversation, I wanna say it was a, a few months before, maybe around Thanksgiving or something, and he basically said, I need to get my affairs in order because I wanna make sure if anything happens to me, your mom's taken care of and you don't have a mess to clean up.
Meaning me, because yes, I am the oldest daughter. But I've also been the trustee on my parents' trust for a very long time. He knew that it had been a while since we updated all of that. So I took that little opening where it was his idea, I need to get things in order, and I said, absolutely. And I also knew that that was the opening I needed because I was gonna have to have power of attorney over him, power of attorney over mom.
I was gonna have to have access to all of their finances in order to hire and pay for nurses. All of that, I needed to be able to step in and take care of as soon as he agreed to go to rehab. So literally, that was a incredibly stressful time for me.
I hired the interventionist, I wanna say the beginning of February, 2021, and we had the intervention. At the end of April, and I had dad in rehab, literally, he said yes to going, and my husband and I drove him to rehab the next day. And then I proceeded to spend about three months getting my mom set up with nurses.
So it was a very, very intense period, and I've shared that. A little bit on the podcast. I don't know if you had heard those episodes, but I shared a little bit of it because that was a season where my business basically ran itself for the first half of 2021. I told Amber, who's my director of operations,
I think I'm gonna have to step in and take care of my parents. What do I need to do here? At that point, my business was already running incredibly smoothly. I have a great team. I had people who could step in and handle calls. I had all the systems in place for our marketing, for our sales, for our client delivery.
Just like I teach inside of The CEO Collective, we practice what we preach. So I was able to be a hundred percent present with my mom and. Take care of her for three months while I was finding more help, because at that point I knew I needed to find full-time nursing care and find people who could really handle this situation.
So I was really lucky because that's when Ms. Liz came into my life and she's a retired RN who lives very close to my parents' home. So she's only literally a couple miles down the road she was a perfect fit to be mom's primary nurse. If you've ever had to hire caregivers for your parents or your grandparents, it's really hard.
It is incredibly hard. If you're hiring private nurses, you're going by word of mouth. Often people will find private nurses from. You know, if their parent or grandparent ended up in a rehabilitation hospital after a fall, or they spent a little bit of time in a convalescence or nursing home, they'll often just try to hire the CNAs who are there.
But because of my mom's medically complex needs, I knew I needed someone who could actually. Be my eyes and ears and take her to doctor's appointments and give me the updates who could manage her medications, who really had a deeper understanding than a typical, nurse assistant, which is a CNA. So all of that happened in 2021.
It was one of the most stressful times in my life. I basically spent. The whole first half of the year, getting my mom taken care of, making sure I had everything handled, getting my dad the help he needed, and by the time summer rolled around, things were completely different. I had mom's full-time nursing care in place.
We figured out all of the night nurses and the weekend nurses, and we've had bumps in the road, but I felt like, okay, I've got this under control. Things are going well. Dad gets back from rehab and he's doing incredibly well with his recovery. But of course, as. Life happens, life gets even busier and that's what started to happen for me at the end of 2021.
It was a really interesting season where on the business front, my business was growing and growing and there were opportunities showing up. Even though I wasn't actively seeking a ton of opportunities, like there was a lot happening. If you all remember, we had so many people shifting into the world of entrepreneurship.
We had an explosion in small businesses. We had a lot of money coming into the economy just because the PPP loans were out there. The EIDL loans were out there. People were. Getting access to financing so that they could start their thing. And we rode that wave, definitely. I was able to ride that wave without efforting a lot because the infrastructure was already there.
Everything I had worked on at that point for 15, I. Years was already in place. So it was pretty incredible that my business was able to not only keep going, but grow through that entire year, even though I really went from working my normal about 24, 25 hours a week down to, I would estimate, 10 to 15 hours a week.
And there were a lot of times, that the only thing I was doing was my weekly call. Inside of The CEO Collective and then one-on-one calls. And the rest of the time, my team was handling absolutely everything. We were repurposing content. We already had, we were leveraging all of our systems. So I really was growing, even though I wasn't actively putting a whole lot of time, energy, and attention into the business.
And of course. As things happen, like life kept getting busier, the kids went back to school. That was a huge transition. Oh my gosh, my twins went back. They missed fifth and sixth grade. We were homeschooling for the end of fourth and then all of fifth and sixth grade. So they went back as seventh graders.
And let me tell you, seventh grade was rough. Seventh grade was a very tough year for my twins. And Mitchell went back and he's just a very easy. Go with the flow type of kid. So he actually was fine going back when he went back to school, but my twins had a little bit harder of a time. And thankfully Jameson, my husband, was on top of everything to help them with that transition, my business continued to grow.
It continued to grow through 20 21, 20 22. And then around 2023, we really started to see things shift. About halfway through the year, we started to see, this was when inflation was really getting pretty bad. Expenses were getting really bad, and. Money wasn't as easily available to a lot of people, so no longer did we have the EIDL loans or, the economy stimulation checks that a lot of us got.
And during the pandemic, now we had. That surge of interest in entrepreneurship and small business kind of tapered back as the economy was changing and things were changing a lot. And so we started to see that shift in the business and that's when I was like, okay, time to crank it up again. I had to go from letting my business kind of do its thing and honestly me coasting on it while I was taking care of my mom to, okay, now we're gonna focus on growing The CEO Collective.
And we did. We grew it. Really quickly to the point where I had a team of six mentors working with my clients inside of The CEO Collective. I had, my operations director, I had podcast producer. I had somebody pitching me for podcast interviews. I mean, all said and done. I had about 12 people helping me with running this business.
And the CEO retreats had grown even bigger to the point where we no longer fit in my office, the office space I had. Taking the time to get and to decorate and to upgrade specifically to host the CEO retreats. We were having more interest than we knew what to do with. So I started hosting them at a different location.
And I remember there was the September of 2023 retreat. It was the first time I had the entire team of mentors at the retreat. It was a coolest feeling just having all of my team together. Usually that doesn't happen 'cause everybody's spread all over the us but it was just this feeling of, oh my gosh, this is so awesome.
This is working. I love my business, I love my team. I just felt so excited about what was happening. Well, of course, every time there's a big high, you know, life is gonna life and there's a new stage coming. So what's happened since then? Well. About a year ago, I decided it was time to let go of my office.
We were coming up on the lease renewal. If you rent an office space, you know, you usually rent for three years or five years, something like that. I was coming up on the lease renewal and we had a bird infestation in my office and my beautifully designed office. A bunch of birds had somehow gotten into my office.
It looks like they came in through some sort of vent and they were trapped in my office for like a week. It took forever for the maintenance company to get them out. I actually had to get my lawyer involved because I got a call from the woman who had the office across the hallway from me, and she messaged me late at night saying, Racheal, there are birds flying around your office.
So Lee and I. Drive from our house all the way downtown. Yes, there are birds in the office. They are pooping on absolutely everything. And so it's 10 o'clock at night. We're sitting out in the lobby of the building waiting for the maintenance guy to get there to figure out what we're gonna do about these birds.
They didn't know what to do about the birds and. It ended up being the kind of last straw for me with this particular office management company. I loved my office, but man did I learn a lesson about. Taking on an office when the landlords are absentee and they're big corporations and they really don't care about their tenants, because I had to get my lawyer involved to get the birds removed and to get everything sanitized and cleaned up again.
And then after me asking for months saying, I'd love to stay here, can you please send me the terms for the lease renewal they sent me? A lease renewal with a 40% increase in my rent for the office. And at that point I had had multiple issues with the building. There had been a lot of leaks in the building where I hadn't been able to use my office because they had to put those big industrial dryer things in there.
I had the bird infestation, we had a bathroom issue. Like they've had several issues with the maintenance of this building. And granted it was a hundred year old building. I get it. But. Yeah, the fact that they gave me a 40% increase in rent, and when I tried to talk to them about that, they were like, well, this is market rate.
Meanwhile, I'm walking around downtown Richmond going, there are so many empty spaces here, and guess what y'all, I left that office space at the end of September. I told them I wasn't going to renew my lease. They did not come back to try to keep me at all, but that place has been vacant. Since I closed down the office in September and one of the things on top of the fact that, you know, the bird infestation kind of just really pissed me off and the way they handled it just made me really angry that you could be a great tenant and take great care of their space and.
They're gonna not take care of you. That really bothers me because that is a core value of mine, is that you take care of the people who take care of you, right? I don't treat my clients the way that this rental company treated me. It made me incredibly mad. But on top of the bird infestation and me deciding not to renew the lease, I knew it was a good time to say no to it because a lot was happening again on the personal front.
So last year I. Got a lupus diagnosis. I've been struggling with chronic illness, kind of under the umbrella of chronic pain and chronic fatigue for most of my life, since I would say most of my adult life at this point. I first got diagnosed with it when I was about 30 and. For a long time just lump you under that diagnosis and don't do a whole lot more exploring.
But the last few years I've gotten a lot more clarity on what exactly is happening. Instead of them just saying, well, you have chronic pain, chronic fatigue, we don't really know what it is and we don't know how to help you. I started to actually get to see specialists who were. Really helpful and one of those was a rheumatologist who helped me see, yes, you have lupus and that's why you have so much chronic pain and chronic fatigue, and they gave me new medication, which has been amazing.
Now granted, I go to a rheumatologist and I'm the youngest person there by about 30 years, but I don't care. It makes me feel so much better. They listened to me and got me. You know the medication they need so that I'm not constantly in a certain level of pain. And I also finally got a doctor to listen to me about perimenopause.
So that was a huge win. I'm now 42, but I've known, I've been going through perimenopause since, probably since I was 37 or 38 was when I started to have hot flashes no one listened to me. They would just say, oh, you're too young. You're too young. It's just anxiety. I did everything I could on my own when finally I got a doctor who said, no, let's go ahead and try some HRT and see if that helps y'all.
It helps. It helps so much. You will pry these little dot stickers, the Estrada stickers off of. My cold dead body because it makes such a huge difference in how I feel. It has dramatically reduced my hot flashes and my night sweats. Still a little bit of experimenting, but that's a lot of like medical diagnosis all in one year and trying to figure out all the medication and the way that you feel, all of it.
It was a lot, right, and at the same time I knew. My twins were going into high school. Um, Alex and Lee applied to different specialty centers in our county. Um, we live in a pretty big county. We live in Henrico County and there's this thing where they can apply to a specialty center at different high schools where they can almost like major in something they think they wanna go into.
Long term. And so they both applied and got into the specialty centers they wanted to go into, which was a big shift. And now I knew, okay, we had two freshmen in high school going to two different high schools. My youngest was going into middle school. This is another huge shift for our family. So I really felt clear that this was a good time for me to let go of the office and simplify things.
I also, at the time. Again, my business was shifting a little bit. Like I shared with you as we went into the end of 2023, we started to see. The economy shifting. We started to see the community shifting a little bit. We started to see buyer behavior shifting, and my team members started to shift. I had several team members who between the end of 2023 and the beginning of, I wanna say 2025, basically, they had things come up in their own lives and their own businesses, and it was.
You know, an easy conversation may be hard for them, but they had things come up that they wanted to focus on. And I will always, encourage anyone who ever works with me, either on my team or as a client, you are responsible for your own direction and if there is something coming up that you need to focus on or a new direction you wanna go, I'm always gonna cheer them on.
So slowly we started seeing our team members moving on until we're down to our two core, mentors. Erica and Lane, who have been with me the longest, they're absolutely wonderful. I'm so grateful for them. But it was a big shift, right? Like all these things over the last 18 months, it was like. Three years ago, I had 18 months of just taking care of parents and coming outta that pandemic and business was taking off, and then suddenly it started to shift again.
Where business started to change, things started to slow down. My team started to have other things they wanted to focus on, and I had to make different decisions because now my family was entering this new stage of life, and the first year of high school is now done. It was a big year. I'm really glad my kids applied to these programs because I think they're in great programs with other kids who are just like them, and that's been really cool to see.
It's been really cool to see them make friends and find themselves a little bit more. I'm really loving the teenage years. It's been a lot of fun for me. I think I'm a good teen mom. I love engaging with them and watching them. You know, grow and become more of their own person and really develop their own thoughts and opinions and, question things and try new things.
It's been really cool. But this year was a pretty intense year. Um, and then my dad relapsed last April we were at his house. I was down there checking on him and my mom and I knew he had relapsed. I had heard from a couple people that he was struggling, and so of course, what do you do You.
Try to say, Hey, you need to go back to aa. You need to call your guys. You need to call your support system. But anyone who's ever had alcoholics in your family, you've probably seen what I've seen, which is when they relapse, they start to retreat, they start to withdraw. And isolate quite a lot. And that's what was happening is dad went from going to multiple AA meetings a week, having a really good support system, checking in.
He had a great group of guys from his, rehab that kept up with each other and they were like texting and talking to each other every morning to, he was isolating himself and we were there at his house last year. Checking on him, checking on my mom, and he fell and he fell and got this really huge gash in the back of his head.
I insisted that he go to the hospital and he ended up needing a bunch of staples in the back of his head because it was a huge, four inch gash where he hit his head on the corner of the wall. It scared the shit out of me and I said to him, you need to go back to rehab. And he agreed he needed to go back to rehab.
So he did. He went back to rehab last year, last April, and it seems to be, April is the month where dad goes back to rehab because he went again this April. He went to rehab last year and he relapsed pretty quickly and that's been really hard to watch because there was a good. 18 months after his first time going to rehab where I felt like, oh my God, I finally got my dad back.
He was engaging with me and my sisters and spending time with us, spending time with our kids. We felt like we could actually do things together. He came up and saw the kids swim meets and he came up and spent time with us. We would have time together where we could go out and do things, but. When he relapsed for me and my sisters, our rule has been, you know, we're not bringing our kids around.
That you're, you've gotta get help, you've gotta be in a program, you've gotta be active, in aa, in your recovery, because we don't want our kids around this. And so when he relapsed, pretty much as soon as he came back from rehab, this past last year, this time last year, I heard that he relapsed pretty quickly.
I was very, very scared because at that point he was falling. Turns out, if you've been an alcoholic for most of your adult life, there's a lot of health problems that come along with that. And some of the health problems that are impacted by that can include things like neuropathy. You can't feel your feet.
It can include things like AFib. Which is where your heartbeat is not, able to keep up with things. But basically he was, if he was standing up too fast, he was getting dizzy and blacking out and falling over. And it was really scary to watch this happen so quickly among a lot of other complications from being an alcoholic.
And so when he relapsed again, I basically was like, you have got to get it together here. And we had to put some boundaries in place. I was still making sure mom was taken care of. But man, this last year he really, really hit rock bottom. I'm hoping, I'm praying this is his rock bottom because I don't have it in me to go through this again.
This year he got a DUI and actually two DUIs. Turns out he got one in January that no one knew about. And then he got another one at the end of April. Again, I don't know what it is. With April, I'm gonna have to have somebody like read his astrology chart or something. 'cause there's something with April and my dad relapsing and going to rehab or it finally getting bad enough where he has to go to rehab.
But. Somehow him getting a DUI, I think was the rock bottom he needed. Because now it wasn't just me saying he needed to go to rehab. It wasn't just my mom saying he had to go to rehab. It wasn't just my mom's nurses saying he had to go to rehab or the people at my dad's office saying he had to go to rehab.
Now it was a lawyer saying, you need to go to rehab and get this handled. And so. I've been navigating his third round of going to rehab. I'm not exactly sure when he's coming back. I know he is gonna have to deal with some consequences legally of this. But man, this time has been quite a financial mess because.
He has made a big old mess, over the last year of honestly being negligent of himself, being negligent of my parents' finances, of their finances, and making some real bad decisions. So that's what has been happening for me for the past six weeks. I have been actively cleaning up some of this financial mess he's made.
Because I already had all of my power of attorney and me set up as trustee and all of these things, I was able to jump in and get things handled pretty quickly. But I was pretty disappointed to find out that some things that I thought were taken care of were not taken care of, it's really, really frustrating when you realize you had not been told the whole truth about what was happening because my dad has owned a business for the past 40 years.
I've been pretty involved in the last five years of him figuring out how he's going to basically dissolve all of their estate, you know, get rid of things as they retire. And one of the things we've been doing is downsizing his business, including selling off some of the office buildings he had purchased over the years.
And so by a miracle, we had just closed on the sale of one of the office buildings. Out in chin fatigue, Virginia, and that allowed me to catch up all the finances, get a handle on things, and start to figure out what the next steps are. This is another opening. I'm looking at it trying to be as positive as I can be because I've been wanting to move my mom, especially into a senior living closer to me for a very long time,
and maybe some of y'all have dealt with this too, is dealing with elderly parents who want what they want and do not want to change. And mom did not want to move. She wanted to stay there even though she was living in a house by herself with around the clock nursing care. And it was an hour and a half for me and my sister and her sister.
The last five years, we've been spending over $16,000 a month to pay nurses to come and take care of her at home. And that's on top of all the costs of keeping her in a home, right? Like you've got a mortgage, you've got bills, her, handicap accessible van, wheelchair, accessible van, all the medical equipment she needs, all of it.
And the reason we've been able to pay that has honestly been because my dad's business, has been pretty successful. And as we've been selling off these office buildings, we've basically been able to cash flow all of mom's care between the business and the office building sales. But at this point, I finally was like, mom, I've gotta put my foot down.
This is crazy. I can't do this anymore. We need to simplify your. Living situation and move you closer to me. There are not enough nurses to easily keep nurses on staff, living at home and it's been one of the hardest things we've had to navigate. Again, I'm so lucky because Miss Liz, who I hired way back in 2021, has been with my mom now for four years, and she has been a lifesaver to me.
She took over. Hiring nurses and managing the schedule and making sure everything that mom needs is taken care of. But there gets to be a point where, you know, trying to keep home healthcare going is really hard. Nurses quit very easily and very frequently. If they get a better paying option or a different job opportunity, a lot of times they will go to that because it is hard to do home healthcare.
It's not easy. So I'm really grateful for the care that we have had, but it's just not sustainable long term and it's made it incredibly difficult for me to manage living an hour and a half away. So this is the opening I've needed now to. Really have the hard talk with my parents that this it's time guys.
It is time to move into senior living. I have been able to find a senior care manager who specializes in. Managing all the different aspects of senior care. She's been incredible so far. This is so funny because chat GPT has been saving my life right now as I've been trying to figure out how to put all this together, how to handle all these things.
I have used chat, GPT to figure out, you know. Cash flow wise, how much longer can my parents go before they run outta money? The answer is about five years. Um, I've had it analyze what are the different options for my mother. If I have to move her somewhere, what would that cost versus what I'm spending now?
What if I had to put dad somewhere else? What would that cost? What would that look like if I sold the business at this, what would that look like if I sold his business at this? You know, I've run chat GPT to death with every scenario I can come up with. But it led me to a care manager who is a social worker who started their own business to help people in this exact situation.
And she's been a godsend because she's helped connect me with somebody who specializes in placing tough, residential care, high needs people like my mom into care. So we're in the process of looking at, residential care closer to me here in the Richmond area and. It's helped me to find out other things that I didn't even know we could take advantage of.
Like my dad's a veteran and he never took advantage of any of his veterans benefits, and that's still something we could look into. So that's been huge, over the last few months as I'm figuring all of this out and I'm always like, you know what? I've been really proud of myself that I've held up my boundaries in all of this over the last few years.
It's been really hard to hold up those boundaries. When I knew my dad was struggling, of course the first thing I wanted to do was swoop in and fix it. But I knew at that point he had already gone to rehab twice. He had all the skills that he needed to.
Make a decision, and me saying it over and over and over again or trying to control what he was doing was just going to harm me in the process and harm my, my family, my kids, my husband in the process. So it's really hard to watch somebody run into a wall again and again and again. 'Cause they have to learn the lesson the hard way.
And unfortunately that's what's happening for my dad. I am. I'm grateful that I have this window right now to make the shift I need to make for my mom's care, especially. I'm glad I have the window I have right now, and so far my dad is on board with what I'd like him to do for his care, and helping him move into a sober living and have a, a program that he will continue to work
to me it just feels like, okay, it's been hard, but I have this window where we can make things easier, hopefully, where we can simplify my parents' life, we can simplify, their retirement, we can simplify their care so that it's not such a burden on me. And hopefully not such a trigger for my dad.
It is always messy. Y'all life is so freaking hard sometimes it is so messy and at the same time, it's so beautiful, right? And I just shared so much. I feel like I just had a big. Vulnerability, vomit of like everything going on in my life. And it's been so hard, but I'm, I am also like, I have learned so much.
I have grown so much the whole time I've been navigating all of this. You better believe I have been resourcing myself. I have been doing my own work. I have been talking to my therapist. When all of this first happened, I went to a week long program at Onsite in Tennessee called. Well, we called it trauma camp, but it was a, basically a trauma camp.
It was a trauma recovery program. And so I've been doing all of my work alongside of this so that I can hold my boundaries so that I can prioritize myself and my mental health so that I am, not falling into codependent behaviors with my parents, but instead trying to find that balance between. What I feel is my responsibility and what is not my responsibility, and that was a really hard lesson for me.
My responsibility is not to make sure my parents are happy. I can't control that. It's up to them to be happy. My responsibility, especially for my mother, is to make sure she is cared for, to make sure that she has a place to stay and quality care so she can have dignity. In her life, my responsibility is to make sure that the money is handled so that her care is paid for.
It's not showing up to be her, um, emotional garbage can to, you know, dump her emotions into me. I'm not her therapist, I'm her kid, and that has been something. That's been probably my biggest personal learning through all of this is really clearly what is my responsibility?
What am I actually taking on here versus what is not my responsibility and what boundaries do I need to put in place to make sure I'm not harming myself in the process? It's so. Brutal. And it's so beautiful. I've had wonderful moments with both of my parents through all of this, and I've also had really hard moments with them where I've had to just check them and say, Nope, I am not the one.
I am not the one for that conversation. Call your therapist. I am not the one for that conversation. Go to AA and, and. I've also really, really worked this year to prioritize my family, my kids, and my husband. And I'm so grateful for my husband. He has been through this with me every step of the way. And because he's also committed to doing his own work, he's been such a huge support system for me.
He's so cute 'cause I, he's gonna edit this later, but I always tell him. He's my golden retriever husband. He's my emotional support husband. He is the one that I want, with me when I'm having a really hard time because he's just gonna hold space for me and comfort me, not try to change me or fix anything.
But he, he's gotten so amazingly good at being that emotional support person. And over the last few years. You know, I've always prioritized time with the kids, but especially as they've gotten older, our time together has changed so much. Their little personalities have evolved, and I feel like as they're getting into.
High school and middle school and everything, it becomes less about telling your kids what to do and more about letting them figure out what they wanna do and just being there to support them. I really think of myself more as like a coach for them compared to like when they're younger, you tell them what to do.
You have to set really strict rules and all of that. When they're older, when they're this age, I want them to learn how to be independent. I want them to try things out and fail. I want them to see what happens if they stay up all night playing video games. But we have a family rule that you have to be outta bed by 10 o'clock this summer.
You know, they're learning right now, and it's been really fun to watch them have those experiences and try new things out and see what they really like and who they really are. So I've been really grateful for that. And I've been really grateful for my close friends who have been there for me every step of the way.
Those friendships, my closest friends, who are the ones I'm texting, or the ones I'm calling, or the ones I'm going away for the weekend with. Are the emotional support system I didn't know I needed before, really before I would say 2020, when my kids were really little. I hadn't prioritized female friendships.
I was so into my business into taking care of my kids when they were younger. And after the pandemic, I just became really, really clear. I need women in my life. I need emotional support, not just my husband. I love my husband, but your partner can't be everything. You know, that's too much on them.
And sometimes you need people to talk about your husband too as well. So it's been a wild, a wild few years looking back on it, there's still so much to impact. I'm still in the middle of figuring a lot of stuff out with my parents as I am continuing to look at. Selling my dad's insurance agency, selling the final office building.
I'll have to sell mom's house here. When I get her placed, there's still a lot there to figure out, but it's figureoutable and I know I can handle it, and I know I'll be fine, and I know they'll be fine. They'll be taken care of, they'll be safe, they'll be cared for, and that is my responsibility now. So I hope you enjoyed this.
Kind of messy. It's messy in the middle, y'all. And you know what? We're always in the middle. When I first thought of this podcast idea, I thought that messy season in 2021 and 2022, like from the pandemic 2020 to 2022. Really? I thought that was just gonna be like, oh, this is gonna be the real hard, messy season.
And then it's over and it's all up from here. No friends. Life is a messy journey and. This has definitely been one of the harder seasons I've had in my entire life. I'm hoping, it doesn't get this crazy again, but you know, there's so much you don't have control over. There's so much you don't have control over.
But what you do have control over is learning how to resource yourself, learning how to ask for support, learning how to make sure your business. Is actually stable enough to handle when the shit hits the fan in your life and making sure that you're taking care of yourself along the way.
Until we get to the very end of our life, we're in the messy middle. So same for your business as long as you have a business there. The rest of the time until you're ready to leave your business, close your business, sell your business, it's all the messy middle, because stuff is gonna happen That's outta your control, and your job as the CEO of your life in business is to figure out how to handle it and how to move through it with intention and with integrity.
I wanna know from you, uh, your thoughts on this episode. Is there anything I've shared you want me to go more into? I am a thousand percent willing to go there. I'm willing to talk about, you know, parents and long-term care. I am totally happy to talk about selling a business. I am happy to talk about navigating alcoholism and recovery as a family.
Let me know. I wanna hear from you, so if you listen this way this long, then something struck a chord and I'd love to hear more about your thoughts. So make sure you reach out to me on Instagram at Racheal dot Cook. And with that, I will see you in the next episode.